page_title: Autonomous spaceport drone ship
section_title: Vessel missions
hierarchical_section_title: Autonomous spaceport drone ship / Vessel missions
caption_attribution_description: Arabsat-6A Mission
context_page_description: An autonomous spaceport drone ship is an ocean-going vessel derived from a deck barge, outfitted with station-keeping engines and a large landing platform and is controlled by an autonomous robot. Construction of such ships was commissioned by aerospace company SpaceX to allow for recovery of rocket first-stages at sea for missions which do not carry enough fuel to return to the launch site after boosting spacecraft onto an orbital or transplanetary trajectory.
  SpaceX has two operational drone ships. Just Read the Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You, which both operate in the Atlantic for launches from Cape Canaveral. JRtI operated in the Pacific for Vandenberg launches from 2016 to 2019 before leaving the Port of LA in August 2019. As of 2 June 2020, 43 Falcon 9 flights have attempted to land on a drone ship, with 34 of them succeeding.
  The ASDS are a key early operational component in the SpaceX objective to significantly lower the price of space launch services through "full and rapid reusability," and were developed as part of the multi-year reusable rocket development program SpaceX undertook to engineer the technology.
context_section_description: The first flight test was 10 January 2015
  when SpaceX conducted a controlled-descent flight test to land the first-stage of Falcon 9 Flight 14 on a solid surface after it was used to loft a contracted payload toward Earth orbit. SpaceX projected prior to the first landing attempt that the likelihood of successfully landing on the platform would be 50 percent or less. The landings went from being landing tests towards being routine parts of missions.
caption: The booster before tipping over during transport
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